While touch screen tablets and slates are gradually making their way into homes and other institutions as PC replacements, surprisingly the enterprise is probably going to be the first place that such a shift may occur.
Enterprises have always valued mobility and convenience which is why we may actually see some enterprises making the shift from laptops to tablets, slates and Smartphones as early as 2013. Here are some numbers and percentages from 2012 to support this assumption.
CEO’S fuel the drive
It is no secret that most IT administrators think that BYOD and consumerization at the work place (especially their workplace) are mainly the fault of the tablet toting CEO(s), VPs and other upper management. The thing is, they are probably right as 78% of CEOs commonly used tablets over desktops while a whopping 84.8% chose Smartphones over more traditional devices such as laptops.
This data which was taken from Decisive Analytics and Domo.com among others, shows that CEOs will continue to fuel the drive for tablet adoption at the workplace, if not for the good of the company or organization but to at least get access to the relevant data from their mobile device of choice.
Apple continues to dominate
Most CEOs use IOS devices. While there is a tendency for most companies and enterprises to provide their sales teams and lower management with Android and BlackBerry devices, Fortune 500 companies on the other hand usually provision their employees with IOS devices (mainly the Apple iPad).
The wow factor of the Apple iPad has been shown to help increase effectiveness of sales, despite the fact that most technical people consider the Apple iPad to be more of a security vulnerability than an enterprise computing device. While the lack of viruses on the Apple platform makes it attractive now, it is only a matter of time until hackers and virus makers concentrate their efforts here, especially since this where all the money seems to be gathering.
Following the pack
Most enterprises are following suit with 94% of Fortune 500 companies indicating that they would invest in or are deploying touchscreen tablets such as the Apple iPad for their employees (which basically means the majority of them are willing to give it a try). Again, most of these indicated that they would carry out such moves with the Apple iPad or other IOS devices.
Already, 97% of enterprise tablet activations comprise of Apple iPads and 44% business executives have reported using such tablets for work purposes as compared to the 30% of salespeople who have admitted to doing so. About 67% of tablet users have reported using it to work from home or remotely from the office successfully, making it a device that could help spur your work-from-home efforts asides from the more traditional laptop.
In support of Better BYOD
While more than 47% of tablet users reported that they were using their own devices at work, a mere 10% of organizations were even aware of the devices accessing the network. This makes it even more important for companies and organizations have a comprehensive BYOD policy in place as more advances in tablet technology signal another progressive year of the tablet and Smartphone adoption in the workplace.
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Ismail Wasim Application developer for Android and Apple applications. For more info click here.